The present invention relates to the field of electronic publishing systems employed for forms generation. In particular, the invention relates to a system and method for generating an object code output program that corresponds to a desired form to be printed/
Many businesses today use a variety of preprinted forms such as invoices, credit and debit notes, checks, petty-cash slips, etc., that are relatively expensive on a per transaction basis. The expense of the preprinted forms stems from the requirements of individually designing the form, printing expenses, and storage space for storing a ready supply of the forms. Expenses are also incurred every time a minor change is made to a standard preprinted form which requires the supply of old forms be destroyed. In additional, manual entry errors result in a large number of forms being discarded.
With the advent of readily available personal computers and word processing software, some attempts have been made to deal with the problem of expensive waste of preprinted forms. For example, many word processing software packages permit the user to set up a screen format that allows the user to fill in form information (such as data variables), on the screen, correct for errors, and print the form information on a preprinted form. While such packages reduce waste due to manual entry errors, they still require the use of preprinted forms which must be manually loaded to a printer. Thus, effort is constantly wasted by manually switching the type of preprinted forms being loaded in the printer, or printer resources are wasted by dedicating certain printers to print particular forms.
The recent introduction of laser printers and desktop publishing software packages have provided a partial solution to the problem of preprinted forms, namely, the entire form can be generated and printed by the desktop publishing software package eliminating the need for preprinted forms. For example, XEROX Corporation offers a desktop publishing software package called Ventura Publishing that permits the creation of a document containing both text and graphics which may be printed on a laser printer.
Desktop publishing systems, however, inherently contain a major drawback to their use as forms generating systems, namely, they generally produce a document file which includes text and graphics data, page layout information, etc., that can only be accessed and utilized through the use of the particular desk top publishing software employed to create the document file. In situations where a central office employs desktop publishing software to create a standardized invoice form document file, each branch office that wishes to use the document file must purchase the desktop publishing software. In fact, under most licensing agreements, a separate desktop publishing software package has to be purchased for each workstation at the branch office on which the document file is to be utilized. Thus, while current desktop publishing systems may be helpful in reducing the problem of preprinted forms, the expense of purchasing desktop publishing software for each workstation makes the use of such software as a forms generation system prohibitive.